A team of Australian physicists have created a new research assistant to run experiments in quantum mechanics in the form of an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm, which promptly took control of the experiment, learned on the job, and even innovated. “I didn’t expect the machine could learn to do the experiment itself, from scratch, in under an hour,” said co-lead researcher Paul Wigley from the Australian National University (ANU) Research School of Physics and Engineering in a statement. “A simple computer program would have taken longer than the age of the universe to run through all the combinations and work this out,” he added. Scientists wanted to recreate an experiment that won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics, which involved extremely cold gas trapped in a laser beam known as…